HEY GERONIMO
release second album
‘CONTENT’
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Support for ‘CONTENT’
“A crunching return that crackles with rare electricity”.
– Clash (UK)
“There’s magic in the air and we have Hey Geronimo to thank”.
– Keep Walking Music (USA)
“The Brisbane trio could very well deliver the year’s most clever LP”.
– The Revue (CAN)
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Following on from returning with a pair of critically acclaimed singles ‘Disconnect’ and ‘Working For Google’, Brisbane-based indie-rock group Hey Geronimo have just unveiled their sophomore album ‘CONTENT’.
When Hey Geronimo lost a guitarist in 2016, they enlisted artificial intelligence to cover the slack. Using a heavily modified version of music writing program Amper, an AI dubbed ‘Alex’ wrote and performed lead guitar for half a dozen tracks on Hey Geronimo’s new album, CONTENT.
Guitarist and singer Pete Kilroy laughs about how fans find the news of Artificial Intelligence replacing humans not particularly perplexing. “Everyone’s nonchalantly like, ‘Oh! Cool!’” Kilroy says. “Another song imagines a future where we’re all working for Google and people say: ‘Yeah. That’ll probably happen.’ I mean, shouldn’t we all be worried about this shit?”
Hey Geronimo are worried about this shit. Alex the AI is expedient, but also ironic. CONTENT is a concept album that deals with a bizarre future that’s evolving in front of our eyes. It tells of a world giving itself over to technology so seamlessly that nobody is actually noticing. As Kilroy puts it, one theme of CONTENT isn’t explicitly about how technology addiction is weird; it’s about how weird it is that nobody thinks technology addiction is weird.
Producing the album themselves, the band focused on stripping out extraneous instrumentation, keeping everything lean and propulsive. The final result is a huge leap forward for Hey Geronimo. CONTENT is a focused collection of digital punk-rock that plays like a cautionary tale on how humans are being gaslighted by their own technology. It ranges from the glam-tinged stomp of lead single ‘Disconnect’ – at once the most restrained and muscular thing Hey Geronimo have ever recorded – to the orchestral grandeur of Abbey Road-era Beatles in ‘Second Skin’, and the cultish internet kumbaya of ‘Working For Google’.
Gone are the self-conscious quirks and u-turns of Crashing Into the Sun, which was the result of four different songwriters pushing and pulling on each other’s work. CONTENT reflects the bands Hey Geronimo were listening to at the time – XTC, The Beatles, Roger Waters, The Flaming Lips, Blur – Bingley, Jonze and Kilroy writing together around a carefully coiled central idea.
To celebrate the release of ‘CONTENT’, Hey Geronimo will set out on an East Coast tour in November with performances set in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. The ambitious new live show draws inspiration from Roger Waters’ recent ‘Us and Them’ world tour.
Since their inception, Hey Geronimo have become a mainstay fixture on the Australian festival circuit with appearances at Big Day Out, Festival of the Sun, Homebake, The Big Pineapple Festival and Valley Fiesta. The band have also toured the country multiple times, selling out their own headline shows.
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‘CONTENT’ is out now
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